Description

Having finished the Tamiya UE, I thought it would be interesting to
build a companion piece of the Lorraine tractor. There are actually
two Lorraine tractors out in plastic, from Ironside from France and
RPM from Poland. RPM offers it in both the Lorraine 37L TRC
refueling vehicle version and Lorraine 38L VBCP infantry carrier,
though neither come with their respective trailers. The Ironside kit
is in the Lorraine 37L configuration without the refueling trailer.

After looking over both kits, I decided to go with the Ironside kit
as the track is link-and-length, not the fearsome looking
link-to-link in the RPM box. Also, Ironside offers some nice PE and
resin bits and the detail overall looked a bit better.

Ironside is one of the brand names of ADV/Azimut in Paris and this
kit was first released in 1997. It is reminiscent of the old Alby
plastic Panhard 178 in quality and I wonder if there isn't a link.

As is typical of most limited run kits, it takes a fair amount of
work to get things to fit and to clean up the parts. My project
involved converting it to the infantry carrier which had higher rear
sides for the infantry section. The basic version was intended to
tow an armored trailer for six more infantrymen, but I didn't really
have enough info on this trailer to scratch-build it, and I wasn't
in the mood anyway. I had found one of the excellent Alby resin 47mm
AT guns many years ago in France and this was a good excuse to build
it. The Lorraine was tested to tow this weapon, but the Lorraine was
more commonly used with the 25mm AT gun.

I decided to pursue this
combination on the assumption that given the chaos of 1940, it was a
possibility even if not the standard configuration. Information on
the combat use of the Lorraine 38L in 1940 is not exactly
overwhelming! The tanker figure is from the resin Wolf series.

The conversion was straight-forward as the box shape in the rear is
simple. I made it out of sheet plastic, mainly .015 thou and some
.010 thou for some bits. The tarp was made from a combination of
vacu-form for the basic shape and Christmas tissue for the folded
bits. This model will appear as a full-length article in Military
Modelling, including a lot of historical photos of the Lorraine 38L
including unpublished interior detail shots of the rear compartment.